0:50’s Reviews > The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers > Status Update

First sin: totem and taboo, unconceptualized sacrificial ritual, the sin is in the concrete animal spirit
Second sin: sacrifice itself conceptualized as sin in the dawn of natural science, Empedocles has proclamations against it, the sin is in the abstract madness of the procedure

Theology denies the abstract madness, but the the abstract madness returns as Christianity but this time embodied as the last sacrifice

In the new intellectual climate, the life-breath becomes personalized and the game of responsibility is in a sense began anew: whereas in the Homeric conception, people are frighteningly much like puppets ruled over by an impersonal life breath and determined by bodily emotions. The problem of sacrifice reaches its unproblematized stage in this robotic view. Are we not in a similar period with regard to science?

So, in the birth of natural science we have paradoxically a turn away from a mechanistic, materialistic, bodily explanation of emotional states and instead what is apparently a reversion to older myth, in a new way though, as a kind of intellectualization of it. While the concept of force was first based on love/hate, later in science love/hate themselves are explained with different sorts of forces.

two essential concepts for scientific terminology: the organization of a city and its mutual concord with the world and the deeper substrate of a sacrifice-based idea of a fall, of a punitive nature of this order. Then the lifebreath/bodily state-dualism of Homeric times, psyche as breath, a link in this order --> the concept of moral transmigration. But this is after a mechanistic view of emotions in Homeric times

"Empedocles seeks to understand inorganic processes in terms of organic life rather than vice versa" And it is this way he posited the firstconcept of force in attraction and repulsion, but called them love and hate. The birth of science was also accompanied by democratizing of the theogonic rank order of the Gods. Understanding of universe based on laws is also based on the concepts of politics from nomoi and kosmos

Kant and Parmenides share their essential point, but what does it mean when the supersensible world of causality is ultimately based on impressing the reification of the flawed, incomplete causal series of perception, the lack of perception which shows us that even that is discursive? And first antinomy shows even space has some additional element since we don't see the impossible.

Parmenides anticipates Kant's discursivity thesis here by acknowledging thought to be a product of mixture, which is why there *is* being and not-being, although it doesn't make sense if you think of being individually. This means that the mixture is only possible by a contact to a dimension we can't truly grasp, for otherwise the perception would have the kind of consistency it nominally requires within itself.

"What the understanding contributes is the all important consideration that the Existent cannot be as our senses reveal it to us" re: parmenides.